Senior Database Platform Engineer

Kraken is a mission-focused company rooted in crypto values, aiming to accelerate the global adoption of crypto for financial freedom and inclusion. The Core Infrastructure – Data Systems team builds and runs shared data systems used by other engineering teams to ship production services safely and scale globally. Technologies operated include MariaDB, Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch, and adjacent tooling.

• Strong hands-on experience operating production-grade stateful or distributed systems.
• Solid software engineering skills in a language such as Python, Rust, Go, or similar, with a track record of automating infrastructure or operations work.
• Experience deploying and operating tools and services in production.
• Practical Kubernetes experience, especially around stateful workloads, upgrades, storage, and failure modes.
• Strong Linux, networking, and systems troubleshooting fundamentals.
• Experience with observability, alerting, incident response, and post-incident improvement.

Nice to haves:

• MariaDB / PostgreSQL
• Kafka
• Redis / Valkey
• Elasticsearch / OpenSearch
• MongoDB, ClickHouse, Cassandra, or similar NoSQL / distributed data systems
• Terraform, GitOps, CI/CD, operators, or other automation-heavy infrastructure patterns
• Query tuning, schema design, replication, clustering, or high-availability design
• Data engineering or pipeline-adjacent technologies such as CDC, Kafka Connect, Flink, or similar

The opportunity:

• Own the reliability, availability, performance, capacity, backup/restore, disaster recovery, and security posture of shared data systems.
• Operate and improve platforms such as Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch, MariaDB and other NoSQL databases with tight SLAs.
• Build and maintain high-touch abstractions and self-service workflows for provisioning, schema evolution, common operational changes, and routine maintenance.
• Use programming and AI-assisted workflows to automate repetitive work, improve diagnostics, raise documentation quality, and shorten time-to-resolution during incidents.
• Implement, deploy, operate, and improve satellite tools that improve the platform and increase operational leverage.
• Partner closely with internal engineering teams on data access patterns, query optimization, schema design, operational readiness, and safe adoption of shared infrastructure.
• Improve observability, alerting, SLOs, runbooks, and operational reviews to make systems easier to understand and reduce incidents.
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response.

Applicants may redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance at or graduation from an educational institution. Kraken considers qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. Kraken is an equal opportunity employer and does not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on protected characteristics as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.